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It’s also Earth Day and the March For Science, but I’m trying to stay focused here.

Should you decide to patronize your friendly neighborhood record store, don’t just do it for the collectibles. All the Record Store Day releases are novel and interesting, but they’re also more expensive than other albums you might find today.

Pick up that David Bowie live box set if you must, but also see what other new releases the store has. Check out the used collection. Go through the dollar bin.

I found this gem for $1 at a record store several years ago. It’s in great shape and features some of the best-known American classical music.

You don’t need to spend your grocery budget on records. It’s a hobby that can be as expensive or as cheap as you want it to be.

For the collector, Record Store Day should just be a day to reinforce what you already do on a regular basis: Go to a store and find interesting music.

If you’re not a collector, let this be an introduction to the vast universe of records at your disposal. All you need is a turntable and some curiosity.

Seriously: Check out the dollar bin. You never know what undervalued gems you might find.

A woman pushes a stroller past the Grindcore House restaurant shuttered in solidarity with “A Day Without a Woman” in Philadelphia, Wednesday, March 8, 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Tuesday was #NationalPancakeDay. Today is International Women’s Day. It’s amazing, and refreshing, frankly, how quickly the internet can turn serious.

It’s too early to tell how the corresponding protest, #ADayWithoutWomen, will pan out. Online commenters and pundits have debated whether a general strike by the nation’s women is a practical protest, especially for those women who can’t afford to skip work. Either way, this is still an important day to pause and recognize that, as a society and as a planet, we don’t give women their due.

Here, then, is my humble attempt to balance the scales: Recommendations of cultural contributions all made by women.

Album:

Case/Lang/Viers

A power trio of incredible singers Neko Case, kd lang and Laura Viers that came out on Anti- Records in 2016. The album is by turns upbeat and poppy, soft and retrospective, and always enjoyable.

Book:

“Kindred” by Octavia Butler

A science fiction book about time travel and slavery. Butler’s protagonist, Dana, finds herself hurled back in time to Antebellum Maryland, where she comes face to face with the man who owned her ancestors.

Movie:

“Rogue One”

There are lots of movies featuring strong female leads. But I give props to the new generation of “Star Wars” films for putting women at the center of their heroic journeys. “The Force Awakens” has Rey, who’s a badass in her own right, but Felicity Jones’ Jyn is a must-see performance.

Graphic Novel:

“Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi

This graphic novel, presented in black and white, is a compelling memoir of Marjane Satrapi’s childhood in Iran both before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Twitter account:

JK Rowling

The “Harry Potter” author is a fantastic writer of books, but she’s a great person to follow on Twitter for her blistering rebukes of would-be trolls.

How to lose a job in 1 day

A tech CEO went on a Facebook tirade on Election Night after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency. Matt Harrigan, now an ex-CEO, was not happy. He threatened to kill Trump in terms that were pretty unambiguous.

“I’m going to kill the President Elect. Bring it secret service.”

Though his post was on a private page, it went viral anyway. See? Never assume your social posts can’t be seen by everyone on the internet. Harrigan apologized for his tirade but he’s now on paid leave from the company he founded in 2013.

Racism isn’t dead

The Obamas are moving out of the White House, but some in our country are hardly moving on from the racist attitudes that have been a stain on the Republic for centuries. After a woman in West Virginia posted a photo to Facebook calling first lady Michelle Obama an ape, the mayor of Clay, W.Va., praised the image in a comment. Beverly Whaling was criticized and, on Tuesday, resigned her post, leaving three years left in her term.

Speech is still free

A high school student in Ohio wanted to expose a schoolmate’s racism, so she reposted said schoolmate’s racist remarks on Snapchat. Then she and another girl got suspended, accused of “being disruptive” for reposting the comments. But the American Civil Liberties Union got involved and asked school officials to cancel their punishment of one-day suspension. The school did so for one of the girls. The other one had already served her suspension.

Celebrities and social media are a mixed bag. This week I look at one who does social media well, one who did it badly and one non celebrity who nonetheless should have known better.

Silent Bob strikes back

Director Kevin Smith, whom you may know from “Mallrats,” “Clerks” and “Comic Book Men,” has urged an online commenter to make his own “dreams come true.” AWWW! That’s so sweet!

Not really. Smith was responding to a comment criticizing his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, after she posted a picture of herself on Instagram. The troll, whom one can assume is an awful person, called the younger smith “ugly” and “talentless, and wished her dead. The elder Smith suggested the troll should follow his own dreams, “instead of slamming others for doing the same.”

Not exactly a zinger, but still a nice move to combat online bullies.

Photo bomb

TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres posted a doctored photo of herself riding on the back of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt on Twitter on Monday, with the caption: This is how I’m running errands from now on.”

Only problem is, the image of a white woman riding a black man is considered racist by many on social media. She came under fire for her post, and Degeneres had to later tweet that she’s “highly aware of the racism that exists in our country” and she’s not racist.

I doubt that any reasonable person would think Degeneres is racist, and I’m sure she wasn’t thinking of the historic symbolism of the photo. But once people on Twitter pointed that out — and many did — she should have pulled the photo and apologized.

Loud as a peacock

An NBC executive got in trouble this week after writing a post critical of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Robert Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment, said that Trump’s “‘mind’ is so demented,” though he doesn’t refer to Trump by name.

Greenblatt doesn’t oversee the news division or have any say in the network’s campaign coverage. Still, it was a remarkably idiotic thing to say on Facebook, even if he thought it was a private post.

Brock Turner is an awful human being. Let’s agree to start there. Turner, you may have heard, is a rapist who also swam for Stanford University. (For what it’s worth, I don’t really care whatever redeeming qualities one may have; getting convicted of rape and blaming the victim automatically qualify one as a bad person.)

This might be a standard campus-rape story, as depressing as that notion is, if not for the victim’s letter that was read at Turner’s sentencing and posted on Buzzfeed earlier this month. It went viral and Turner became the internet’s latest bête noire. The victim, an unidentified young woman, became the hero of this story, even more so after a letter from Turner’s dad defending the rapist also went viral.

Part of the outrage is the sentence that Turner received: six months in county jail and probation, far below the six years that prosecutors were asking. He could potentially get out of jail in three months.

The story became all that anyone could talk about on social media. Even Vice President Joe Biden weighed in, offering support to the victim. Others started a petition to recall the judge. But most people simply shared the news on Facebook and elsewhere with the reaction: “This is an outrage!”

They’re right, of course. But lots of stories on social media get the blood boiling these days. We read them, we see red, we share them and comment with sentiments like, “This is terrible!” “I know!” “I’m disgusted!” etc. etc.

Outrage is a funny thing. It burns bright and feels like action. But it soon fades, and the world too often is, right where we left it. Sexual assaults on campus are still too common. The Brock Turners of the world still get away with it. Victims still get blamed.

If you are enraged by the horrible way the victim was treated and the light punishment Turner got, don’t just share an article and comment. Anybody can do that.

Instead, find a way to help in the real world. It starts by not accepting the idea that alcohol or campus partying are acceptable scapegoats for sexual assault. But it doesn’t end there. If you want to make a difference, do something more than just shouting about it on social media.

Otherwise this story will go the way of Cecil the Lion, and be just as ineffective.

Watch what you like

Russians on social media riskprison for posts that they like or repost. More and more people in that country have been convicted of hate speech, from 92 six years ago to 233 last year. Among the latest criminals was a man from Tver, Russia, who shared a cartoon of a toothpaste tube with the words “Squeeze Russia out of yourself” with his 12 friends. He is now serving a two-year prison sentence. The Kremlin considers hate speech to include anything critical of the state. It’s up to the courts to decide if social media posts are considered a threat.

Keeper of the shame

The Associated Press reports that the woman found the photos on the girl’s phone, sent them to herself then posted them on the victim’s Facebook page, even changing the password so the girl couldn’t remove them. Her lawyer said she wanted to teach the girl a lesson, and that she’s not a child pornographer.

Lesson learned; Don’t be friends with this woman.

Yes, MySpace is back

It’s never good when a social network that’s been out of the spotlight suddenly gets into the news. Turns out, believe it or not, that MySpace is not dead. Still, let me warn you now to delete your account, assuming you still have one there.

The ancient social network was the target of a massive hack/data dump. On Friday, the Washington Post reports, details on more than 360 million MySpace accounts were dumped online, in a hack that dates back to June 2013.

I know what you’re thinking; That many people were on MySpace in 2013?

At any rate, the company says it disabled the passwords to all those accounts. But Brian Fung, author of the Post piece, recommends you delete your accounts of any social networks you don’t use anymore. So if you still have a MySpace account, get rid of it.

If you still use it, then by all means keep using it. But maybe you should delete your Napster account.

A few weeks ago, this space was devoted to fails on Twitter. This week, in the interest of fairness, I’m turning my sights on Facebook, the one social network to rule them all. Zuckerberg and company didn’t monopolize the week’s social media fails, but it’s worth pointing out a few mistakes.

Facebook: India dealt the social media giant a huge setback this week when it denied Zuckerberg’s nonprofit arm, Internet.org, from providing “free” and extremely limited Internet access to the country’s poor. Net neutrality advocates considered the ruling a win, since Zuckerberg’s plan, called Free Basics, would have provided free access to only a small corner of the Internet.

Marc Andreessen: The Facebook board member apologized this week for a tweet (how ironic) implying that India should have also embraced colonialism the way it should have embraced Free Basic. A Twitter firestorm erupted, as they are wont to do, and Andreessen apologized, stressing that he is “100% against colonialism.”

Ted Nugent: The right-wing rocker posted an anti-Semitic attack on 12 Jewish-Americans on his Facebook page, saying they are responsible for gun control. telling his fans “They hate freedom, they hate good over evil,” etc. He referred to Mike Bloomberg as the former mayor of “Jew York City.”

Needless to say, his post was roundly condemned, including by the Anti-Defamation League, which called it “nothing short of conspiratorial anti-Semitism.”

Nugent, for his part, insisted he’s not anti-Semitic.

Twitter: The company’s stock fell this week, despite a fourth-quarter earnings report that showed strong revenues. The social network’s user base also remained flat, at some 320 million users, or one-fifth the size of Facebook. To try to attract more tweeters, the company changed its timeline feature, which of course only angered Twitter’s core user base.

And this week’s winner is:

Facebook.

The company, which made last week’s Socially Awkward Media for banning a legal medical marijuana business in New Jersey, reversed course. Over the weekend the page of Compassionate Sciences in Bellmawr, N.J., was restored, albeit without photos of marijuana and prices. Two other dispensaries that had their pages removed were back on Facebook this week, as well.

The critically acclaimed show’s first season hit Netflix on Friday and has earned praise for its gritty, dark (often literally dark) portrayal of Daredevil, a blind vigilante superhero who fights crime in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York. We are supposed to root for Matt Murdock, the lawyer-turned-superhero, for all the right reasons: He’s blind; he’s a defense lawyer who only takes innocent clients; he fights bad guys.

Then, in the blink of an eye — or rather a slash near the eye — Murdock cedes the moral high ground. He has a bad guy chained to a water tower on the roof of a building and needs to find out from said bad guy where a kidnapped boy is held. Questioning gets him nowhere, of course. With the help of a nurse at his side (I’ll get into that in a bit), he find out the prime place to cut the bad guy to cause the most pain. After that, and a threat to throw him off the roof, the bad guy tells Murdock what he needs to know.

The lesson here, which contradicts reality, is that torture works. It’s a lesson we saw in “24,” in “Zero Dark Thirty” and even “Harry Potter”: Good guys can use torture to get what they want.

It’s a shame that the political atmosphere of the Bush years provided ambiguity to a subject that used to be crystal-clear: Torture is wrong. Once our government endorsed methods that would previously have warranted war-crimes charges, pop culture followed suit. Along came Jack Bauer and the repeating “ticking time bomb” scenario that made torture not only necessary, but justified.

“Daredevil” opted for the same cheap ploy, only this time the ticking time bomb was a missing kid.

A few minutes before this disturbing scene, the nurse – who heals Murdock’s wounds in her apartment – asks him how she can be sure she’s on the right side. After all, he beats people up and dragged an unconcsious man to the roof of a building, chaining him to a water tower. Murdock’s response is, essentially, that he’s one of the good guys.

His interrogation of the bad guy in the next scene undercuts (sorry) his entire case.

For a long time, heroes in literature fought evil without becoming evil themselves. Apparently today’s writers have abandoned this notion. Even Harry Potter tortured and brainwashed people to get to Voldemort and faced no consequences.

It seems reasonable, though, to expect a 30-year-old educated lawyer to make better moral choices than a 17-year-old kid.

This has been a bad week to be a mayor, a judge or a terrorist group. Check out this week’s social media fails — and find out who won social media at the bottom of this post.

Peoria’s mayor: Parody Twitter accounts are touchy. Done well, they’re funny (see the Sarcastic Mars Rover Twitter feed). Every other time, they’re train wrecks that only enrage, never enlighten. But rarely do they bring about a police raid.

As someone who’s been involved with Twitter parody accounts before, I can sympathize with Mayor Jim Ardis. But he should have known he had recourse against Daniel that didn’t involve a raid.

ISIS: You may remember that the hacker collective Anonymous declared war on ISIS a while back. Now an attempt to create a Facebook-style social network for the terrorist group’s supporters have been sabotaged. Britain’s Independent newspaper reports that Khelafabook was set up as a way for ISIS and its supporters to communicate. But the site was taken down within days of its launch, and Anonymous is taking credit.

Florida judge Linda Schoonover: The Seminole County Circuit judge is fighting a special prosecutor’s request for her Facebook records as part of a larger investigation into possible wrongdoing. Among Schoonover’s misdeeds: She reportedly sent a friend request to a woman who appeared before her in a divorce case. After the friend request was denied, Schoonover ruled against the woman and ordered her to pay $4,000 a month in alimony and legal fees.

Anyone with a selfie stick: Life just got harder for the pack of narcissists who want to post selfies on Instagram but not look like they’re posting selfies. London’s National Gallery joined a growing list of tourist attractions around the world that have banned the selfie stick, a telescoping monopod that lets you take pictures of yourself from a distance or shoot a photo over a crowd. On the plus side: They do make for adequate back-scratchers.

Maine state Sen. Michael Willette: The Republican politician representing a portion of Northern Maine faces pressure to resign after posting several offensive messages on Facebook, including one that, according to the Associated Press, suggests President Barack Obama’s family members are part of ISIS. I have no opinion on whether Willette should resign, but I really hope he’s not representing his constituents with his bigoted and offensive social media presence.

The Federal Communications Commission released its Open Internet rules today, two weeks after it approved them. Scoff if you will at the timing: Why not release the rules before the vote? (Answer: It’s complicated, but essentially because as a regulatory, not legislative, body, the FCC relies on non-public discussions among its members as well as public comments in making its rules.)

Critics of net neutrality, and even some allies, might also chafe at the length of the final document: 487 pages. That’s TL:DR for many people, but the FCC also released an accompanying document that is perhaps slightly more valuable: A three-page fact sheet separating myth from fact. It’s an important document because myth has been trumping fact way too often in this whole debate.

You can read the entire sheet here, but I’ll provide excerpts from three of the biggest, most pernicious falsehoods that have been poisoning the debate over net neutrality:

Myth: Net neutrality is a government takeover of the Internet.

This is false. The open-Internet rules apply to connectivity, not content. They prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating against types of content when it comes to delivering information to consumers. No “Fast Lanes,” no “pay to play”; that’s what this means. It has no effect on the content of the Internet itself. It also means that if you’re a small startup Internet company, you don’t have to compete with big players like Netflix or YouTube when it comes to getting your content to consumers.

As the FCC puts it:

“The Order doesn’t regulate Internet content, applications or services or how the Internet operates, its routing or its addressing.”

Myth: This is utility-style regulation.

The FCC says that the Order actually bars tariffs, rate regulations and unbundling requirements that are typical of utility regulation:

“No broadband provider will need to get the FCC’s approval before offering any price, product or plan.”

Myth: The FCC will set rates for broadband access.

That’s a fear that the FCC says is unfounded; it doesn’t regulate broadband rates at all.

“Broadband providers will be able to adjust retail rates without Commission approval and without having to wait even a minute.”

I’ve written before that we can and should have a debate about net neutrality. But let’s base it in facts and reason, rather than fear and myth-making.

And if you’re still worried about what the FCC will do with its Open Internet rules, read the entire order — all 487 pages of it.